British health tech startups seek US foothold

British entrepreneurs touting new technologies for concerns such as keeping tabs on addled elderly or trouble getting pregnant were courting Silicon Valley connections on Wednesday.Nineteen promising startups were here to connect with investors, technology titans, and potential partners as part of a Future Health Mission backed by the British Technology Strategy Board."We brought the best and the brightest companies that we think are on the bottom of the growth hockey stick to the San Francisco Bay Area," said the board's Zahid Latif.

San Francisco tech workers have no idea why they have become the target of anti-gentrification protests in part because the last time the city went through the creative destruction of a tech boom many of them were still in middle school.

Guest blog post by the San Francisco MBDA Business Center
Led by National Director Alejandra Castillo,
the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) has been
collaborating with the San Francisco MBDA Business Center (SFMBC),
operated by ASIAN, Inc., to advance a groundbreaking technology transfer
and innovation agenda.
The SFMBC, along with its sister San
Jose and Fresno MBDA Business Centers, serve the Greater
San Francisco Bay Area, which is universally recognized as one of the world’s
leading regions for technology innovation and entrepreneurship. Minority
business entrepreneurs (MBEs) in this region are not short of innovative ideas
and are all too eager to gain access to cutting-edge technologies from national
laboratories and universities, especially in life sciences, IT, and clean
technology sectors. We’re working diligently to get those MBEs into these
emerging markets.
In September 2014, the SFMBC began piloting MBDA’s
strategic Technology
Transfer and Innovation Program. Closely working with Director
Castillo, we designed our pilot model to engage regional MBEs with technology
transfer and innovation concepts in an effort to connect them with
U.S. and international investors, including angel investors and venture capital
firms, and conventional funding, as well as to assist them with developing
strategic commercialization channels.
To increase awareness among local and regional MBEs and
partners we jointly launched the initiative with Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Keiretsu Forum, and other professional
service partners in October 2014 at our regional 2014 Minority
Enterprise Development Week conference in San Jose.
At the invitation of Director Castillo, the San Francisco
team also brought in its partners and presented the pilot model to
national-level MBE audiences at the National Institute of Standards
and Technology (NIST)’s "Innovations in
STEM: National Priorities and NIST" Symposium in November 2014.
As members of the Keiretsu Forum, the San Francisco and San
Jose MBDA Business Center team actively participated in the Forum’s Angel
Capital Expo that same month, connecting with regional MBEs and over
500 angel investors worldwide. In January 2015, the team was invited to
the JP
Morgan Healthcare Conference, a gateway to connecting foreign investors
with investment opportunities in cutting-edge U.S. technologies in life
sciences.

The debate over "Google buses" has involved a lot of whining and moralizing and defensiveness and undirected rage. So, here's my attempt to use it to address a useful question: How can San Francisco and Silicon Valley communities get more commuters to use public transit, and therefore reduce demand for private shuttles?